Processing Delays at the California Secretary of State Continue for Business Documents Filings

In the past couple of years, corporations and limited liability companies that were formed or registered in California have had to deal with long delays from the Secretary of State in getting their documents processed. Whether the document that is being filed is a Statement of Information, Certificate of Dissolution or Cancellation, or Articles of Incorporation or Organization, the Secretary of State is taking weeks or even months to process a filing. As a business lawyer in San Jose, I have seen a multitude of problems resulting from such delays.

Statements of Information are experiencing the greatest delays, as the Secretary of State is taking several months to process a filing. This has actually created problems for some businesses that pay the filing fee with a check that contains an expiration or “void-by” date. If the check expires before the Secretary of State is able to process the Statement of Information, the Secretary of State will either reject the Statement or treat the payment as a dishonored payment.

Since many of my San Jose clients are newly formed LLCs, I frequently see these delays cause another type of problem. Very often, my client’s bank will require a copy of the LLC’s filed Statement of Information before opening a bank account or approving a loan. Because of the significant amount of time that it is taking for the State to process Statements, I often have to work with my client to take advantage of a relationship with the bank and ask the bank to accept a copy of the Statement that the LLC has submitted for filing.

I can avoid this situation in several ways if I am aware of the need to provide a filed copy of a Statement of Information by a certain date.

For a corporation, we can file the Statement of Information online with the Secretary of State and then request a copy of the record (this option is currently not available to LLCs). This avoids the usual queue. In addition, most regional state offices offer the opportunity for a corporation or LLC to pay an expedited service fee for filing a Statement of Information in person at the Secretary of State’s Sacramento office. We can email the document to our agent in Sacramento who actually walks it into the Secretary of State and files it on an expedited basis over the counter. The benefit to using the expedited service is that we can receive a filing confirmation or response within a guaranteed time frame (usually 24 hours).

Contact Structure Law Group, LLP if your company wants assistance with necessary filings and avoiding problems with government agencies so that you can focus on your business.

The information appearing in this article does not constitute legal advice or opinion. Such advice and opinion are provided by the firm only upon engagement with respect to specific factual situations. Specific questions relating to this article should be addressed directly to the author.